TGN Partners and the Art of Collaboration

Stop, collaborate, and listen – TGN‘s back with a brand new mission. And that mission is advising our awesome TGN Partners how to get the most out of their collaboration efforts. Now, you can fly solo on Youtube and gain a fair bit of recognition, but to really make your channel grow…you’re gonna need to assemble some Avengers.

The key to creating any super Youtube group is to make sure everyone in the group is invested in the success of the group (and we don’t even have to kill Coulson for this). This is, literally, the most important part about creating a successful collaboration. Each member of the collab needs to care about the success of the others as well as themselves. If it becomes negatively competitive, or one person is hogging all the glory, the group will fail.

Beyond that, it’s a matter of making sure each partner is on the same level as the others.

Some good guidelines for how to stack your collab group for success:

Be sure that all channels are around the same size. No one should be too big or too small compared to other members of the group. This will ensure you all grow around the same rate.

The content of the channels should draw similar audiences. It’s highly unlikely that people who like watching Dark Souls will want to watch Hello Kitty Online. But maybe they will? Just check beforehand.

Audience age and maturity is a major factor. Someone who creates content for younger audiences should not team up with a mature channel, or vice versa. I mean, come on.

Amount of videos published to Youtube should be similar. If you create 7 videos a week, and your collab partner creates one or two a month, that will cause problems. Each person needs to pull their own weight.

Timezones should work together. No one should have to wake up ass-early or stay up super late to collab. Unless it’s ALL DAY!

There should not be a major language barrier. All collab partners should speak the same language. It doesn’t have to be fluently, but enough so that you can understand each other.

Games and gaming platforms should be similar. This one’s self-explanatory. Ya’ll gotta be able to play together, right?

After everyone makes sure they won’t kill the other collaboration members, it’s time to start cranking out that awesome collaboration content! Cross-promoting each other on your own channels is a proven way to pull in more subs and viewers, so you should cross-promote as often as you can without, you know, being annoying.

And the best part is – these subscribers and viewers will be solid additions to your channel and continuously watch your content. Fans gained through collaboration are leagues more valuable than one-time fans gained through giveaways…but we’ll talk about that next week. Happy collabs, TGN Partners!